a bubbling cauldron of rank miscellany

from the fingers of Ben McCorkle

I’ve been using Songbird for a while now, and most of the builds have been stable. This is a cool product, IMHO—think iTunes, but with more muscle… and it’s actually plugged into the World Wide Web instead of some Apple server on lockdown. So go get you some of that.

The current issue of WIRED contains an interesting philosophical meditation on the increasingly blurred line between our “real” lives and the gaming world. As the old adage goes, for the kid with a NES control pad, every mushroom is a power-up.

It’s out already? Doesn’t anyone beta-test anymore?!?! I refer my diligent reader(s) to this post on Jason Calacanis’s blog, which proffers an official definition of “web 3.0.” I quote:

Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.

Okay, I know there are plenty of grumblings out there about how Web 2.0 has become tired and overhyped, like, months ago, but you don’t outpace hype by heaping more hype logs on the hype fire (e.g., “Oh yeah? Well I’ll see your Web 3.0 and raise you Web 6.0!”—it’s a little like the web-build version of the nuclear race during the Cold War, or the arms escalation between Elmer and Bugs in “The Rabbit of Seville“). Also, by that definition, it seems that Web 3.0 is actually a fully optimized version of Web 2.0 , or what we might more properly call Web 2.1. But I know the real reason definitions like this are put out there is to get the blogtards all lathered up into a frenzy, and so I won’t be pulled into that muck lest I, too, be defiled. So have your 3.0; I’m going downstairs to play Legend of Zelda.

Although it’s a little pricey, BODIES the Exhibition (located in the old CompUSA space in Easton) is well worth the coin—a surprisingly not-so-morbid journey into the viscera that makes us who we are. Childhood flashbacks to Slim Goodbody aside, this would make for great fodder for anyone thinking about writing an article dealing with rhetorics of the body, visual culture, the rhetoric of science and technology, the cultural politics of death and spectacle, the commodity fetishization of mortality, or any of a number of other critical approaches. Grad students, start your engines…